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Re: Anyone recommend good textbooks for someone starting from a pure software background?
Posted: Tue Jun 30, 2026 6:10 pm
by pierregreen
@ivan22 Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it:
How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation learning even for what used to be a purely classical-controls job. A commonly cited skill gap in new-grad applicants is practical systems integration experience - many candidates are individually strong in ML or in mechanical design, but comparatively few have hands-on experience getting perception, planning, and control to work together reliably on real hardware under time pressure.
Re: Anyone recommend good textbooks for someone starting from a pure software background?
Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2026 8:02 pm
by shill
I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified.
A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver performance rather than pure algorithm design.
Re: Anyone recommend good textbooks for someone starting from a pure software background?
Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2026 6:58 pm
by barbara50
@shill This matches what I've seen too.
A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver performance rather than pure algorithm design.